The Grief That Comes in Waves

You’d had a good week. You laughed at something and didn’t feel guilty. Then a song came on in a shop, or you reached for your phone to tell them something, and it hit you as hard as the first day.

Grief isn’t a staircase

We tend to imagine grief as a series of stages you climb through, one step at a time, until you come out the other side. Most people find it doesn’t work like that. It comes in waves. Some days are calm, some knock you over, and the bad days don’t arrive in any sensible order.

So a wave coming back is not a sign that you’ve gone backwards. It’s not failure, and it’s not proof you’ll feel this way forever. It’s simply what grief does. Over time the waves usually come less often and hit less hard, but they don’t stop on a schedule, and they don’t need to.

What makes a wave worse is fighting it, which means holding your breath, keeping busy and pretending it isn’t happening. Grief is one of those feelings that gets heavier when you won’t let yourself feel it, and lighter, eventually, when you let it move through.

When a wave arrives

Next time it hits, stop what you’re doing if you can, even for two minutes. Put a hand on your chest, breathe slowly and say the person’s name or the name of what you lost. Let whatever comes, come, whether that’s tears, nothing or a memory. When it eases, drink a glass of water and do one small, ordinary thing.

That’s enough for today.